Zarah Sultana quits: What do polls show about a new party’s threat to Labour?

The suspended MP Zarah Sultana has quit the Labour party, in an end to a dramatic final week of the party’s first year in power – but how much should it fear a new Jeremy Corbyn-led party?

The left-leaning vote is already widely split across the UK between Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, pro-Gaza independents and a smattering of tiny left-wing outfits like TUSC, as well as the SNP, Sinn Fein, and Plaid Cymru in the devolved nations.

Unlike the right, it’s a crowded field, with some of the rival parties long entrenched in British politics, each carving out its own corner of the left.

Want green policies but Welsh nationalism? Vote Plaid Cymru. Want progressive social policies but economic liberalism (and whatever hyper-local policy they can get your vote on)? Vote Lib Dem.

Could the Greens be the real losers?

So what hole would a new Corbyn-led party be filling? More in Common polling recently shared with The New Statesman suggests it could receive 10% of the vote, reducing Labour’s vote share from 23% to 20%.

But the real losers of a Corbyn-led left wing party would be the Greens, slashing their vote share almost in half from 9% to 5%.

Anecdotally, it isn’t hard to see why. Many see the Greens as ersatz Labour, a safe haven for the far left fleeing the party of their bogeyman Morgan McSweeney.

The question is whether there is something Jeremy Corbyn or other independent MPs joining the group could offer, or groups they could reach, that the Greens don’t or can’t.

That’s if the outfit can avoid splintering in the meantime. It seems Zarah Sultana may have jumped the gun by announcing that she would be co-leading the party with Corbyn.

‘The public aren’t particularly welcoming to new parties’

Some pollsters are sceptical, too. Damian Lyons Lowe, founder and chief executive of Survation,  warned that it is “fiendishly difficult to assess the support for a party that does not yet exist”, however and hypothetical polling questions have “serious limitations”.

He told LabourList: “If you cast your mind back to Change UK/The Independent Group, there was polling at their outset about the extent to which people might vote for them (18% with YouGov in February 2019 – just 5 points behind Labour). But in subsequent polling and at elections they did not achieve anything like what those conceptual polls showed.

“The British public aren’t particularly welcoming to new parties. We’re also seeing new parties and movements forming on the right – and so the net effect of a potentially new party landscape for the established parties is very difficult to judge.”

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Chris Hopkins, political research director at Savanta, also struck a sceptical note. “I’m not sure Labour MPs will be losing much sleep over it at the moment, but many will be more interested than they’re letting on about what such a party might look like.

“Until this party is standing in elections and taking votes off Labour candidates, I think most Labour MPs will be happy that the leftist threat comes in the form of the Greens or this new party, with neither showing any evidence they have what it takes to appeal to large portions of the electorate.”

‘Electoral room for charismatic left populism’

But plenty of members have long worried about threats to the left, and Scarlett Maguire, founder of pollsters Merlin Strategy, suggested many Labour MPs particularly in urban and university areas.would share their concerns.

She said a left leaning populist party would be more “natural” home for disaffected left-wing voters than Reform. But she added: “It is not yet clear whether a Green party under new leadership (and moved in a more Corbynite direction) or something else like Sultana’s party will capitalise on this.”

Hopkins agreed that there is “electoral room for a charismatic populist-left leader and party in the UK”.  But he added: “I find it hard to believe a Corbyn-Sultana ticket is it.”

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